06/02/06

Park Slope 2009 according to Freejack (1992)

Last week, for the same work-related reasons that had me watching chunks of TradingPlaces (i.e. I was harvesting actors' faces for March's movie-related Believer chart), I watched the first 30 minutes of Freejack.

In case you've forgotten... In Freejack, Emilio Estevez plays a 1991 racecar driver who is about to die in a high-speed accident. Just before Estevez's car crashes and explodes, a mercenary "bonejacker" from the future (Mick Jagger) shoots a laser into 1991 and steals Estevez’s ill-fated body into the Manhattan of 2009.

So... Jagger has saved Estevez's life, but Jagger’s M.O. is sinister. A recently deceased wealthy guy wants to implant his own mind — which is being held, temporarily, on a hard drive — into Estevez's body! Jagger will be paid handsomely for delivering Estevez's unharmed body to mind-transplant surgeons. (In 2009, it is legal to steal a person from the past and transplant your mind into his body as long as the past-person is doomed to die accidentally in <1 second. As a bonejacker you presumably have to be careful about which bodies you steal. (Or maybe you are legally constrained: "not all latent-accident victims' bodies are eligible for legal bonejacking." I didn't re-watch enough to find out.) In Estevez's case, his body would have been burned and/or obliterated in the inevitable car accident; therefore, he was a good bonejack. The absence of his body after the crash is upsetting to 1991 onlookers but not supernaturally alarming. "I guess he just burned up.")

Mayhem ensues when... Estevez, who is supposed to have been mind-wiped just after time travel, escapes from the bonejackers — thereby becoming an illegal "freejack" — and finds a tough-as-nails nun who helps him flee to "Sector Seven. You probably knew it as Park Slope."

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Freejack has been in the back of my mind for close to 14 years now. This was my first encounter with a dichotomous Utopian/Dystopian future. Somehow naively at the time I knew this was the most accurate representation of future's urban/economic enviornment. Such are the (naive? follish? concerned?) thoughts of a pre-teen suburban jewish boy at the movies.